A dead professor, a hot tub and a suicide baffle police
Marcus Lillard, right, has been accused of murdering Marianne Shockley. By Antonia Noori Farzan Antonia Noori Farzan Reporter for the Morning Mix Email Bio Follow May 15 at 6:38 AM In the pre-dawn hours of Sunday morning, as they pulled up the long driveway that led to a cabin surrounded by pines, officials in Milledgeville, Ga., sensed something was wrong.
Things would get even stranger before the sun came up. While waiting to be interviewed by police, Clark Heindel, the former psychologist, killed himself, authorities said. Though the 69-year-old owned the home in central Georgia where the professor was found dead, officials have said that his suicide is not an indication of guilt. Instead, they’ve pointed to Marcus Lillard, 41, who was dating Shockley but hasn’t admitted to playing a role in her death, and now faces murder charges.
“You’re just as likely to find her in the Galápagos Islands as you are the church from her childhood,” her friend Terry Jenkins told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “I don’t think the church is going to be able to hold the amount of people that are going to come to her service.” The professor was bleeding heavily from a head injury, and EMTs got the sense that she had been dead for longer than they had been told. To deputies, something seemed odd about the way the two men, who had been friends for several years, were behaving.
To the deputies, the story about the firewood didn’t make any sense. It had rained heavily on Saturday and there was no chance that the sodden twigs and branches on the forest floor would have been capable of catching a spark. Also, the incident report noted, a large pile of firewood was already stacked near the pool.
Just then, he heard a shotgun blast go off. Inside the house, he found Heindel dead of a self-inflicted gunshot to the head.Officials don’t believe that Heindel played any role in Shockley’s death, the Athens Banner-Herald reported. “This is pure speculation on my part, but maybe he was embarrassed that this happened at his house,” Massee told the paper.
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